u/SCP-iota

For a long time I thought this was the default for the vanilla client, but after hearing some people who mess around with resource packs talking about some of these things, I went down a research side-quest on the community-maintained wiki and it turns out these aren't default and there's a debug mode. It's purely client-side, so nothing bannable or anything, but the overlay is useful at times and the scene inspector makes it easier to learn things. It's made of several variants of the [Synesthesia] status effect combined with the [Ideasthesia] effect, and it lets me open secondary windows that show things like previously seen wiki entries, known questlines, a zoomable minimap and scene inspector (albeit limited to what the client has loaded), and even utilities like the physics simulator and block-based logic programming editor, all shown in a weird language that doesn't exist but I can understand. Even more interesting, the visual overlay always shows things like subtitles, geometric relations, projected corner angles, and trajectories, with a way to import them into the physics simulator. It tends to add very faint static on top of everything, though, and when the brightness is really low, sometimes it starts showing random fractals and sometimes faint objects. There's also this weird background window that's always open that shows colors and patterns based on music and sound effects.

Blood has a lot of iron. The Blood Ocean is a bunch of blood in one place. AT-5 is the real 'consolidation of iron.'

I wish I had the luxury of not worrying about 'low probability, high impact' outcomes. "It probably won't happen-" Only about 0.3% of people in the US have cerebral palsy and only about 0.02% have Ehler's-Danlos syndrome; I have both. "It's not worth worrying about something so unlikely-" I caught RSV before the day I was even supposed to have been born. "You're more likely to die in a car accident-" I know. Almost did. "Taking more risks leads to more rewards-" I'm just gonna say it: survivorship bias.

I've been looking into stories about trans people from the past century, since with the way world politics are going, it would probably be best if we all learn what we can from their experiences, but it seems like information is limited, since most of them (very reasonably) didn't want much focus on them being trans. But of the information that is out there, stories from one particular cohort seems absent despite knowing they were around because they were tangentially mentioned in some of the other records: full-time semi-passing trans women, like those who hadn't yet reached the stage of fully passing and going stealth. And especially since there used to be a real-life-experience requirement just to get HRT during some decades in some regions, I would expect there to have been quite a few. With the modern conversation being largely about boymoding, semi-closeted people, and people living in places where being trans isn't full pariah status the way it was even in the US not long ago, I'd like to know more about what it was like back then.

I wasn't thinking about philosophy or AI at the time. I was thinking about my chronic pain, and how I really wish I didn't have it. That thought, as it often does when it comes up, led to me feeling kinda pissed at the medical field; a bit angry that the world couldn't have been farther along in medical research by the time I came around, so I'm stuck with no cure. I know research takes time and effort, but whenever I study the history of medicine and the way research progressed, I can't help but feel like there were so many missteps taken for no reason other than certain scientists caring more about trying to validate their existing ideas than following the scientific method. Sometimes that thought leads to a more directly angry one: there needs to be accountability for 'mal-research.' Arrogance and willful ignorance among the medical field cause tangible harm, and it is the responsibility of people who publish studies to not be disingenuous. The phrase 'medical Nuremberg' comes to mind sometimes.

Anyway... I understand Roko's Basilisk now. The people who are obsessed with this thing likely don't (at least, deep down) actually fear the invention of a godlike AI that will kill anyone who neglected to help create it. Rather, I think the basilisk is a piece of imagery that they relate to, because, like me, they're probably dealing with something that they came too early into this world to find a solution for; except, for them, it's not necessarily physical pain that they're dealing with, but the lack of a complete mind. Subtle mental disorders that imprison people in their minds and make them shells of themselves must be terrible to live with, so they imagine making a new, better consciousness for themselves as a machine, and their basilisk's wrath isn't much different from my own anger at the negligently slow progress of medicine and the people involved with blood on their hands.

I don't tend to complain about other players, because I get it; I've been new before, I've had lag and bad days, etc. But there's one thing I can't excuse: bad spatial and team awareness. I say this because, unlike most other kinds of 'skill issue,' this isn't specific to Overwatch or even video games in general; it's a baseline human skill. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution gave your brain dedicated structures for mentally keeping track of your surrounds, positioning yourself, and coordinating with others. Countless prehistoric ancestors died so this could be intuitive for you. Even a day-1 noob should have this. It came free with your species. So I can understand if you struggle with aim, or don't know your hero very well, but for the love of god, if you're repeatedly dying, please group up.

This just might be my favorite movie now, so I thought I'd leave my take about the movie as a metaphor, and why I think it's one of very few Lovecraftian movies that's actually worthy of being called Lovecraftian. I think the main theme is the dreadful idea of there being people who are doomed but past the point where no one else will know about their suffering: of course Simon trapped in the iron lung never to return from the blood ocean, the previous convict whose fate is only ever seen by Simon because it was recorded, the people who were abandoned to become Ellie, and even the Quiet Rapture itself because of how it isolates humanity to die in space. Like most good cosmic horror, it carries the implication that there are hidden dark corners of reality that we could stumble into any moment, but that, by their very nature, make sure no one will be able to save us or know about it.

Simon is driven by survival, and he'll do anything for it, but it doesn't matter. Even Ellie seems to change her mind from wanting to share the Light with humanity, to wanting to hide the knowledge of it and Simon's fate. His encounter with the light is very... obfuscated... but it feels kinda like a negotiation, like a last bid for survival; but Ellie won't allow it. It's hard to know whether it's the light of salvation or the light at the end of the tunnel, and that ambiguity is what makes that scene absolute cinema.

(Personally, I love Mineplex and think this is ridiculous, but I wanted to be the first to drop this here, so here ya go)

This is an absolute joke.

You promised the entire community that Mineplex would open today at 2:00 PM EST. It is now well past that time, and the servers are still completely locked down for the general public. Instead of a functional, accessible launch, the only people actually getting through the gates are the pay-to-win crowd who dropped cash for priority access.

The Reality Check

Broken Promises: You set a specific, highly anticipated deadline and failed to meet it.

Pay-to-Win Bias: Locking out your core player base while rolling out the red carpet for big spenders is a slap in the face to everyone who has supported Mineplex.

Destroyed Trust: This completely kills the hype and immediately alienates the community right at launch.

"You can't rebuild a legendary brand by treating your regular player base like second-class citizens."

Fix the server stability, cut the blatant favoritism, and open the network for everyone immediately. We expect a direct explanation and a real solution now, not hours from now.

So this is a thing that can happen, apparently. I've managed to work around the issue, but since I haven't found any other mentions of anything like this on this sub or the official forum, I'm leaving this here for whoever might run into this in the future:

Along the side edges of the screen side of the top cover that came with my Framework 13 (AMD Ryzen 7640) DIY edition, the small built-in metal pieces that are intended to hold the bezel's alignment fins seem to have been fused during manufacturing, and instead of leaving a thin channel for the fins to go down into, they block the channel and prevent the bezel from being able to sit flush with the side. It would leave a gap no matter what, since there is nowhere for the alignment fins to go.

My solution was just to cut off the alignment fins from the left and right sides of the bezel.